Where Clay Takes the Lead: Pottery Weekend returns to Copper Fox Gallery (note new date: 10/24)
At The Copper Fox Gallery in Leiper’s Fork, pottery is less an object than a process—one that begins with a lump of clay and ends somewhere between intention and surprise. On Saturday, September 26, the gallery will host its third annual Pottery Weekend, bringing its local potters out of the studio and into the driveway for an afternoon of demonstrations, conversation, and hands-on making. (Featured Image: Donna Rizzo)
From 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., visitors will be able to watch artists demonstrate slab-building and wheel-throwing techniques. New this year, potter and artist Donna Rizzo will also host a children’s table where young visitors can experiment with hand-building. The event offers an unusually direct encounter with a medium that is often experienced only after the difficult, physical work of making has disappeared into a finished vessel. For the artists participating, however, that physical process is inseparable from the meaning of the work. Rizzo came to pottery through an earlier life in dance and choreography. The transition from one discipline to the other was prompted by something deceptively ordinary: a coffee cup.
“When I was dancing and choreographing I always had a good friend’s pottery cup filled with coffee,” Rizzo recalls. “Someday, I said to myself, I want to make my own cups like his.” She began taking classes and learning to throw, but soon discovered that clay offered more than a new technical skill. “I realized I needed to see if I could tell stories and choreograph with clay instead of on bodies.”
The metaphor is particularly apt. Like dance, pottery is fundamentally concerned with movement, rhythm, balance, and transformation. But clay introduces a different kind of body—one that can be shaped, altered, fired and ultimately asked to stand on its own. Rizzo now describes her clay studio as having replaced her dance studio: “you can find me there every day happy, happy.”
That pleasure in making is shared by Merissa Tobler, whose work begins from another tension inherent in ceramics: the relationship between beauty and use. For Tobler, functionality is a framework within which creativity becomes more meaningful.
“In thinking about my work and why it continues to appeal to me, I realize how much I like creating within the boundaries of functionality,” she says. “Making pieces that will be beautiful to see and a pleasure to use makes the whole process challenging and rewarding.”
Tobler is especially interested in the relationship between pottery and cooking, two practices that transform raw materials into something meant to be shared. A handmade bowl or serving dish ultimately participates in an activity beyond the artist’s studio, becoming part of another person’s daily rituals. “There is the creativity of the cook or the potter,” she explains, “but it is also important to connect with others to complete the process.”
That sense of collaboration extends even to the forces that remain outside an artist’s control. For Linda Crossan, uncertainty is not an unfortunate byproduct of ceramics but one of its essential attractions. The firing process can alter color, texture, surface and form in ways that cannot be entirely predicted.
“Built into the ceramic process is a moment in which an artist must let go and trust the process, knowing that there will be surprises at the finale,” Crossan says. “I love the unexpected and the space I have to make for the Clay to become what it wants to be not always what I think it should be.”
Her observation points toward one of ceramics’ most compelling lessons: control is only temporary. The artist shapes the clay, but the clay also imposes its own conditions. Heat changes it. Gravity changes it. Time changes it. The final object is therefore not simply an expression of an artist’s intention, but the record of an exchange between intention and material.
For Joel Lopez, that exchange carries an even broader resonance. “The potter’s touch mirrors how life shapes us,” he says—a concise description of why handmade ceramics can feel so intimate. Every vessel bears evidence of pressure, movement and decision, while its imperfections preserve the fact that it was made by a person rather than produced anonymously.
Pottery Weekend provides an opportunity to see that process before the finished object settles into its familiar role on a shelf, table or kitchen counter. At Copper Fox, visitors can watch artists work with their hands, ask questions and, in the case of the children’s table, try the process themselves.
The event ultimately makes visible what finished pottery can conceal: that every cup, bowl or vessel contains a history of decisions, accidents, gestures and surrender. Clay may begin in the artist’s hands, but it does not remain entirely under their control. That is part of its beauty—and perhaps the reason pottery continues to offer artists such as Rizzo, Tobler, Crossan and Lopez such fertile ground for telling stories.
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